More than 90,000 students missed PSC examinations, likely to be held post lockdown

Kolkata: More than 90,000 candidates across the state had failed to appear in various examinations for government jobs, conducted by West Bengal Public Service Commission due to the country-wide lockdown including the state to prevent the spread of COVID-19 virus. The Commission has been compelled to postpone as many as 12 of its recruitment examinations since PM Modi announced Janta Curfew. The lockdown has been extended phase-wise since then.

"The total number of vacancies against these examinations in which over 90,000 candidates would have appeared was 3,400. We have not been able to hold examinations from March 21. Till May 3, we had a dozen examinations lined up and all these have been cancelled. The interviews and personality tests scheduled during this period have also been postponed," said Debashis Bose, Chairman of PSC.

A senior official said that if we take the examinations scheduled in May in this list of postponement of examinations then the list will go up to 17 and the number of candidates will go up to 1.5 lakh. The important examinations in the cancelled list are two categories of recruitment in ICDS- one for promotion and another for direct recruitment and 30,000 and 40,000 candidates were scheduled to appear in these two categories. Also, 30,000 examinees would have sat for the recruitment of ward master in ESI hospitals while the same number would have appeared for the examination to recruit motor vehicle inspector.

"We are not in a position to plan the schedule of the postponed examinations at this juncture as we have no clear idea of when the lockdown will be lifted. But we will try to conduct the examinations in quick time after the lockdown is lifted," said Bose.

The PSC had plans to conduct the West Bengal Civil Services (Main) 2020 examinations in June-July. The officials are sceptical of conducting this examination as per plans in the current circumstances.